Consequence of Workmanship

 Committing to a chisel chamfer

I bought both of David Pye's seminal books on Stewart Brand's recommendation probably 1972 and they're both still rumbling around in my head.(One is missing at this point). On design and workmanship. 
You can jig or machine everything up and get repeated results or you can trust (and live with) doing things in a way that will show your handwork.
I jig and machine the crap out of stuff, no worries.  But there are times when I want to live and die by a couple degree dip of a chisel or a commitment to strike the center of something in one strike.

On the first piece of furniture I built for J&D, I had rasped some what I thought looked like stylized tree roots in the bottom of the legs.  They wanted the same detail on the Iron Bark Kimono.  I did it again this time but wanted them to be more from the hand so how they came off the gouge is how they will be.  One proved to have gotten the best of me and so it shall stand as my failure.

The chiseled chamfers on the curves

From this morning.

The drawer dovetails.  Half blind in front, through in the back.
Cut them on the WoodRat.  I know you won't know what that is.  Nobody does which I can't understand but there are those objects that are so sublime but which nobody can see.  The WoodRat is one of them.
You dance with it.  It's a machine, it's a jig but at the same time there is a consequence of workmanship involved.  It's not rote, it's intuitively fluid and light.  It's so sublime it twists your head to see things differently.

The template (which you make) is on the left, the piece you're cutting is on the right.  They are tied together.  Move one, the other moves the same distance.
You judge where things are with your eye.

A trial piece to see if your calculations are correct.

Drawer fronts, sides as they come off.

Starting to chisel rounded corners to become sharp corners.

Finished drawer fronts.  Glue up tomorrow.

Edit.
Glued up one of the drawers last night.  This is straight out of the clamps.  A teensy tiny gap on the top half tail but once it gets finished you won't even see that.  The rest of what you see is a shadow around the tails and pins.